Jerry Kramer - Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

In my life as a writer and reader, there are only a few books that I've read over and over again for the sheer pleasure of the experience. Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay is the only sports book among them. I loved it when I was a teenager, and I love it still today.

DAVID MARANISS, author of When Pride Still Mattered

One of the great sports books of all time.

Billy Crystal

This was the book that started it allfor athletes telling their stories, for sportswriters going in depth, for great athletic tales being bound between the covers. Dick Schaap's classic is timeless. Required reading for anyone who loves sports or sportswriting.

Mitch Albom, bestselling author, columnist for the Detroit Free Press

It's forty-five-wind-chill-degrees-below in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dallas leads the Packers in the last quarter of the final playoff of the season. Driving the length of the field in the game's final des perate minutes, Green Bay is stopped by a wall of Cowboys at their goal line. Quarterback Bart Starr grabs the ball, charges at the mass of bodies, dances around Jerry Kramer's perfect block, and suddenly he's in the end zone. He's done itwinning Green Bay its third straight title in a row, a first, on the coldest day of this or any other year. And I was there. I saw it all through tear-frozen eyes. And it was almost as exciting as the book Instant Replay, Kramer and pal Dick Schaap's bestseller that tells how it came to happen.

D. A. Pennebaker, filmmaker

As a girl who loved sports, I began to understand the fascinating world of the professional athlete and the magic of wonderful sportswriting from the pages of Instant Replay. I also soon realized I had found a hero in a man who later would become a mentor and friend, the great Dick Schaap.

Christine Brennan, USA Today sports columnist

Instant Replay is as timely today as it was twenty years ago. Dick Schaap and Jerry Kramer put a frame around the sport of football when it was played without today's glamour, glitz, and big business. When I read it twenty years ago I did not want it to end, and now it doesn't have to. Instant Replay's honesty is as compelling to day as it was then. It is still a must-read for fans and people who make sport their profession.

Richard Lapchick

First the writer George Plimpton stepped into the world of pro football. Next Dick Schaap wrote NFL All-Pro Jerry Kramer into the world of literature. And the partnership of sports and books was in motion. Schaap established a literary genre for the ages.

John A. Walsh, ESPN executive editor

What may well be the most famous play in the history of the National Football League took place on the last day of 1967 at Lambeau Field in Green Bay. The temperature was thirteen below, the field was frozen solidthe game is known in NFL mythology as the Ice Bowlyet for nearly sixty minutes the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys played one of the great championship games in NFL history. With sixteen seconds to go, the Cowboys held a - lead, but the Packers were on the Cowboys' one-foot line. It was third down. The footing was dreadful. Rather than settling for a field goal and a tie, with overtime to follow, Green Bay quarterback Bart Starr decided to go for the win. He called a quarterback sneak, to be run behind his right guard, Jerry Kramer, who was facing the ferocious Dallas defensive tackle Jethro Pugh. Let Kramer tell it:

I slammed into Jethro hard. All he had time to do was raise his left arm. He didn't even get it up all the way and I charged into him. His body was a little high, the way we'd noticed in the movies, and, with [Ken] Bowman's help, I moved him outside. Willie Townes, next to Jethro, was down low, very low. He was supposed to come in low and close to the middle. He was low, but he didn't close. He might have filled the hole, but he didn't, and Bart churned into the opening and stretched and fell and landed over the goal line. It was the most beautiful sight in the world, seeing Bart lying next to me and seeing the referee in front of me, his arms over his head, signaling the touchdown. There were thirteen seconds to play.

Kramer's perfectly executed block immediately became a signal moment in American sports history, up there with Bobby Thomson's home run and Jesse Owens's four gold medals and Joe Louis's knockout of Max Schmeling. It is a moment that lives not merely in the grainy films of that epic game but also in Kramer's own words. By unlikely but entirely happy coincidence, Kramer had been persuaded to keep a diary of his 1967 season by Dick Schaap, an uncommonly gifted and convivial journalist. Schaap knew that Kramer was intelligent, literate, observant, and thoughtful, and Schaap suspectedrightlythat Kramer could provide a unique view of pro football from its innermost trenches: the offensive line.

As it turned out, The Block, as it came to be known, provided the dramatic climax for the book that resulted, Instant Replay, which was published in 1968 and became a national bestseller, but the book didn't need The Block to be recognized at once for what it remains to this day: the best inside account of pro football, indeed the best book ever written about that sport and that league. There's much to be said on behalf of Roy Blount Jr.'s About Three Bricks Shy of a Load ( 1974 ), a knowing and amusing examination of the Pittsburgh Steelers as they stood perched on the brink of greatness, but no book matches the immediacy of Kramer's or its intimate knowledge of the game and the punishment men undergo to play it.

My own admiration for Instant Replay was reluctant but then wholehearted. Since the founding in 1960 of the American Football Leagueknown to sportswriters one and all as upstart I had been a supporter of its challenge to the established (and smug) NFL. I was still smarting after the whacking the Packers had administered to the AFL champion Oakland Raiders in the second Super Bowl, played in January 1968 . To me the Packers under Vince Lombardi were like the New York Yankees under Casey Stengel: methodical, ruthless, unbeatable, and on all counts unlovable. But when I read Instant Replay later in 1968 , Kramer and Schaap forced me to reconsider that, not merely because Kramer himself emerged from its pages as entirely likable and admirable but also because their portrait of Lombardi brought out the human side of a man who, from a distance, seemed like a martinet, pure and simple.

Astonishingly, considering the great success and high reputation it enjoyed, Instant Replay has been out of print for years. This seems even more astonishing after a second (or third, or fourth) reading, because the book has lost absolutely nothing over almost four decades. It is funny, smart, evocative, honest, and unpretentious. Its prose is Kramer's, dictated into a tape recorder and regularly mailed to Schaap as the season progressed. Schaap's role was to organize, to condense, to clarify, and to punctuate, but he did not have to polish Jerry Kramer's phrases or prompt his thoughts. All in all, it's as good a job of collaboration between unprofessional writer and professional journalist as I can recall reading, and it is as vivid and engaging now as it was in 1968 .

So this new edition of Instant Replay is especially welcome. It arrives at a time when professional football has replaced baseball as the country's most popular sport, if not as the national pastime. The game has accumulated enough history by now so that past triumphs (and failures) can be viewed with some perspective. The Green Bay team on which Kramer played was the second pro-football dynastythe first being the Cleveland Browns of the early to mid- 1950 sand it has achieved a degree of mythic status that no other pro-football team has enjoyed before or since. In part this is because the Packers were then, as now, the only small-city team in the National Football League, in part because they so emphatically dominated the league, in part because they were an uncommonly appealing group of men, and in large part because they were coached by Vince Lombardi.